“You never know about these small fellows,” the doctor said. “They take a lot of punishment and then something happens that would kill anybody else, but it doesn’t kill them.” He examined the tube and needle, jammed the needle in gently and slowly pressed the handle, forcing the fluid out. “We’ll know in a minute. In the meantime I’ll fill out this report. Who is he?”
Schwartz was about to tell the man who his uncle was when Rock said, “Patrick Kerry.” Rock glanced at Schwartz. He gave the man the other information he needed, and then they talked about highway accidents because that was what the man worked at for the most part. The man was ready, though, when Paul Key opened his eyes.
“How do you feel?” the man said.
Paul Key tried to sit up.
“Not for a moment, please,” the man said, holding him down.
“I want to get to the airport,” Paul Key said. “Rock, I’m all right. Tell him.”
“He’s all right,” Rock said.
“I know,” the man said. “Let’s just give it five minutes, though.”
Paul Key laughed softly, closing his eyes a moment, then opening them again.
“Go ahead, Rock,” he said. “You’ve got to drive to San Francisco. I’d rather you didn’t wait. Take care of yourself.”
“O.K., Paul.”
Rock and his cousin left the hotel. Rock drove to the redbrick church, and went in. He crossed himself, then knelt and prayed for Paul Key. When he went back to the car the boy said, “What happened, Rock?”
“He’s dying,” Rock said. “He’s been dying for years.”
“Patrick Kerry? Who’s that?”
“Paul Key. Shut up a minute.”
They drove in silence to the house on Winery Street. It was eight o’clock in the morning now. The old lady was sitting on the sofa in the parlor, a small satchel at her feet.
“Are we driving now to San Francisco to see my daughter?” she said.
“Yes,” Rock said. “Have you been waiting long?”
“I wanted to be ready.”
“Let me use the bathroom,” Rock said, “then we’ll go. You’ll like the car. It’s new. Leather seats.”
“Has it got a radio?” the old lady said.
“Oh yes.”
“If you get tired talking to me, you can listen to the radio.”
“No,” Rock said. “I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you all the way to San Francisco.”
Haig stood in the bedroom and talked to Rock in the bathroom, vomiting in there, trying to vomit silently.
“You worked something out, didn’t you, Rock?” he said.
“A lot of things,” Rock said.
“Is he going to get you a deferment, so you can make a patriotic picture?”
“No.”
“Did you borrow a lot of money from him?”
“No.”
At last Rock came out of the bathroom.
“Telephone the hotel and ask the desk about Paul Key, will you?”
“Sure,” Haig said.
“Now?” the old lady said. “Are we leaving now?”
“Right this minute,” Rock said.
She got up and went to the door with her satchel. Then she went out onto the front porch. Rock went to the kitchen for one more look at the table where he’d found him. Haig came from the telephone.
“He’s dead, Rock.”
“Fuck him.”
“Aren’t you going back to the hotel to help Schwartz?”
“No.”
“Shall I go back?” Haig said.
“Get on your bike and go home and go to sleep,” Rock said. “Send me your number and everything else I ought to know.”
They left the house, locking the door behind them. From the street he looked back at it. He helped the old lady into the car, then drove off, the boy on the motorcycle racing past the car to wave solemnly and disappear. Rock never saw him again.
“Are your affairs in good order?” the old lady said. “Are they going well?”
“Now, in the morning, when you were a girl,” Rock said, “was it like this?”
“This?” Lula said. “This is no morning.”
“Tell me about a morning, then,” Rock said.
“When I was a girl—ten or eleven, the year before I got married—my man was a young man,” Lula said. “He was twenty-two or twenty-three. I used to get up at dawn because it was then I knew I would see him walking to the city. I used to climb to the roof and from there watch him. He knew I was there every morning. I waited for him to notice that I was there, but he only walked by. One morning, though—and that is the morning I am talking about—he looked up and noticed me. He stopped and smiled. ‘Good morning, Lula Khanoum,’ he said. That was a morning.”
“Yes,” Rock said. “Tell me all about it.”
They were on Highway 99 now, just past Roeding Park, headed for the river at Skaggs Bridge where he’d gone swimming, where Dick Cracker, ten years old, almost twenty-five years ago, had drowned at sunset one night, trying to swim across the river with the rest of them, turning to them to say, “I can’t make it, boys. So long, Vahan. So long, Shag. So long, Rock.”
It doesn’t do a man any good or any harm to lose his soul or lose the world or gain his soul or gain the world. If he’s swimming the San Joaquin River, all he’s got to do is get across. All he’s got to do at any time is not drop dead.
Driving across the bridge, Rock glanced at the place where Dick Cracker had drowned. He’d been a game boy, a redheaded boy, Dikran Kirakjian. They’d all been half-drowning. Dikran Kirakjian didn’t ask any of them for help. He just turned and said so long. It doesn’t do him any harm or any good. All he’s got to do is not stop.
Chapter III
The Son and The Daughter
What is it that happens? What is it that comes to pass? A man who was thirty-three is now forty-one, the year is no longer 1942, it is 1950. The month is no longer September, it is February. He is not driving his new Cadillac through the desert, on his way from Amarillo to San Francisco. He is lying, half-drunk, on a bed in a hotel room in New York.
What is it that happens that a man can understand?
A man lives to be older than his father.
A man has a son of six, named Haig after his brother who died when the man was nine.
A man has a daughter of three named Lula after his mother’s mother.
A man has a divorced wife, now twenty-five, named Ann Ford, called Ann Wagram. A man has a nine-year hang-over on a February afternoon in New York, a black day of snow.
For nine years the man has been winked, but still he winks back. In nine months of separation, three months of divorce, the weight of the man has fallen from 190 to 160 pounds.
What is it that happens?
This is what happens. A man’s weight increases, or decreases, but one way or another a man is winked, as he himself knows. Money comes and goes, or doesn’t come and go, or neither comes nor goes, and he is still the same man. He is still the same man, but can never again be the same, for the time is another time, several of his children have come, several more of his family have died, several more of his friends have died.
The world is still the same world, but it has been so wickedly winked that it is blurred, and it is not easy for the man to get up and see his way to the table to pour another drink.
There is a gray blur in the world. It is in the faces of the strangers the man has lately seen. The way they walk is strange now, too. They walk nervously and swiftly, seeming to look about as they go, seeming to turn to look back, seeming to expect the return of something lost, or the catching up of something evil, seeming to expect something unspeakable.
Or if they do not walk nervously and swiftly, they go as in a trance, as if to execution.
It is in the young, too. They are not young. The telling of jokes is not in them. The living of jokes is not in them. They think, and think bitterly. They get married before they’re twenty-two, hating one another and one another
’s parents, hating art, hating religion, hating places, hating biology, hating chemistry, hating anthropology, hating history, hating children, hating science, hating shoes, hating machinery, hating trees and grass, hating rabbits and flies.
What is it that happens?
The telephone bill rings, and a man reaches over to the receiver, puts it to his ear, and says, “Yes.”
“Rock?” a voice said. “Sam Schwartz. I just flew in. I’m at the St. Regis bar. Come and have a drink.”
“No,” Rock said. “Come up here and have one.”
“David’s with me.”
“Who’s David?”
“P.K.’s son.”
“Who’s P.K.?”
“Is that Rock Wagram?”
“Yes, yes,” Rock said. “I know. You’re Sam Schwartz, Vice-President in Charge of Production at U.S. Pictures. I’m Rock Wagram. P.K.’s Paul Key. I forgot. You’re the only man in the world who ever called him P.K., and I haven’t talked to you in years, Sam. What’s David doing?”
“He’s working with me,” Schwartz said. “He’s twenty-four now, you know.”
“How old are you now?” Rock said.
“Forty-nine,” Schwartz said, “but never felt better in my life.”
“Come on up and have a drink,” Rock said. “I’d like to see you both.”
“You come here, Rock.”
“Come on up and have a drink.”
“I’ll call you back in a few minutes,” Schwartz said. “I don’t know if I can make it.”
“What?” Rock said.
“What’s the matter with you, Rock?” Schwartz said. “I thought you’d be glad to hear from me.”
“I asked you to come up and have a drink,” Rock said.
“Can we meet somewhere for dinner, then?” Sam said.
“No.”
Rock laughed to himself as he put the receiver back in its cradle.
At the table at the other end of the line Sam Schwartz said to his cousin David Key, “Well, I guess they’re right all right. He’s gone crazy all right. He hung up on me. He’s cockeyed drunk. He’s up there drinking. Why should we get up and go there? Who does he think he is, anyway? He hasn’t worked in years.”
“Why hasn’t he?” David said.
“He’s crazy,” Schwartz said. “He’s too tough to get along with. Nobody can talk to him. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left who will want to talk to him. He was good all right, but that was a long time ago.”
“My father liked him very much,” David said. “I believe my father admired him.”
“Your father was a brilliant man,” Schwartz said. “He liked to give difficult people the impression that he admired them. The people he really admired were the ones he treated like dirt. The people he loved he treated like dirt. He was the most brilliant man the industry’s ever known. Everything I know I learned from P.K. He had a way with difficult people who happened to have temporary value. He knew how to get full value for his money out of them. What’s the best way to get something out of somebody? Give him the impression you admire him.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” David Key said, “but my father gave me the impression that he admired Rock. He didn’t give me that impression about very many others who visited us, and a lot of people visited us.”
“Rock’s all right,” Schwartz said, “but let’s face it, he never stopped being an Armenian.”
“He is an Armenian,” David Key said.
“So what?” Schwartz said. “So who cares?”
“I’ve never stopped being Paul Key’s son,” David said. “I’ve never stopped being a Jew, either. I like being my father’s son and I like being a Jew, Sam.”
“You’re a baby,” Schwartz said. “You’re a baby, David. It’s not what you are, it’s what you make of yourself. What you yourself make of yourself.”
“You’re not ashamed of being a Jew, are you, Sam?” David said.
“I haven’t got time to be ashamed,” Schwartz said. “I’m too busy achieving things that must be admired. He had his nerve hanging up on me.”
The boy got up.
“I think I’ll go for a walk,” he said.
Schwartz watched him go.
“I’ve been like a father to him nine years,” Schwartz said. “I’ve been like a father to him since P.K. died, so what does he do to show his appreciation? He insults me. Am I ashamed of being a Jew? he wants to know. When I did the dirty work for his father, I never asked insulting questions. I did my work and helped his father get to the top of the industry. I worked hard. I didn’t travel around with his father like an equal, the way his son travels around with me, and then insults me. That’s what I get for being kind. I helped make his father. Who does he think he is to ask me insulting questions?”
What else happens? What else is it that comes to pass?
The children are born one after another, named, and noticed. They are heard speaking. They are heard living, making the noises of living. They are seen watching, examining, opening and looking into. They are loved, they love.
What else happens, winking?
The telephone bell rings again.
“Yes.”
“Rock? Myra Clewes. Did you read the play?”
“No,” Rock said.
“Rock, please read it,” Myra said.
“I can’t read it. It’s dull.”
“He’s one of the most famous playwrights in America,” Myra said. “How can you say it’s dull?”
“He may be one of the most famous,” Rock said, “but the play is dull just the same. I can’t read it. I read the first nine pages.”
“Rock,” Myra said. “You can’t just say everything’s dull.”
“Everything isn’t. Just this play.”
“Rock, it’s too bad The Indestructibles failed the way it did,” Myra said, “but that was three years ago. Please read the play. I know you’re going to like it. It gets much better as it goes along.”
“I read the last six pages, too,” Rock said.
“It’s awfully powerful in the middle,” Myra said.
“I read three pages in the middle, too,” Rock said. “Everybody screams, but it’s not powerful. It’s noisy.”
“How do I get you mad, Rock?”
“You don’t have to get me mad,” Rock said. “The theatre stinks. We know it does. What do we want to kid ourselves for?”
“It is a lousy play, isn’t it?” Myra said.
“Yes, it is,” Rock said. “But that’s not the point. We could do the play, but what would be the point of that? It would go, most likely, but that wouldn’t mean anything, either. The play doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t say anything in the words, and it doesn’t say anything in the stuff that’s not in the words.”
“Well, anyway,” Myra said, “I’m giving him a birthday party tonight. Everybody’s going to be there. I want you to be there, too.”
“How old is he?” Rock said.
“Fifty.”
“That old?”
“Yes,” Myra said. “I told him you’d be there. You won’t let me down. It’s upstairs at 21. Any time after eight.”
“I don’t feel like going to anybody’s birthday party, Myra.”
“It’ll do you good.”
“I don’t feel like bothering with a lot of people.”
“I’m expecting you, Rock. There’ll be a lot of beautiful girls.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“There will, Rock.”
“I married the most beautiful one there is,” Rock said.
“Yes, I know,” Myra said. “Well, just come to the party. I want to talk to you.”
“O.K., Myra, I’ll try to make it,” he said. “Thanks for asking me.”
That’s what happens.
It isn’t much, item by item, but it mounts up, it mounts up, it winks and mounts up, and a man smiles as he shuts his eyes to see if he can sleep a moment in the afternoon, since he can’t at night. He shuts his eyes
and falls into something that is almost but not quite sleep, he falls into remembering what was, what might have been, and what is. It means something, perhaps something fine, only a man can’t make out what it means, he can’t make it out for the winking and the mounting up of it.
Whatever the time of him, a man is his own poor friend, his own proud stranger, his own cunning enemy, watching with sharp eyes his mother’s own son. It is himself who is the luckiest man, as he himself knows. It is his own half-words and half-acts left in half-places at half-times that grow whole in all men, winking in them and in their children, for a man is the race, every one of him is the race, and each is good, each is innocent, each is winked into his own innocence, as he himself knows. A man lives out his time in secret, leaving behind no word of what he was or did or knew, or leaving only half a word, mixed with coughing or laughter, or half an act of dancing on the floor of his own mother’s kitchen when he was five and loved the promise of time and the world.
He had almost fallen asleep when he heard the knock at the door.
“Come in, David,” he said.
Paul Key’s son found him lying on his bed, the room dark, the dark snow falling softly outside the window.
“Did you say, ‘Come in, David’?” David said.
“Yes,” Rock said. “Pour yourself a drink. Pour me one, too, please.”
“Did you mean me?” David said.
“Yes.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“Sam told me you were with him.”
“Do you remember me?”
“Very well,” Rock said. “And your brother. And your sister. And your mother. And your father.”
“How do you like yours?” David said.
“Over ice, please.”
Rock received the glass from the hand of the son of his dead friend, tasted the liquor, tasted it again, and then lighted a cigarette.
“Will Sam be coming along?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” David said.
“Too bad. I wanted to see him.”
“Is there something you’d like me to tell him?”
“No,” Rock said. “I’d just like to see him again. How does he look these days?”
“Well, he’s bigger than ever,” David said. “Still, he’s got a lot of stamina for a heavy man.”
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